Quotes About Organisms

Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals.

Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out.

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?" I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean." "It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century.

Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Spaceship? Of course. Were they built by naturally evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?

Virtually all animals—single-celled organisms as well as humans—are conditioned to react in predictable ways, some of which we can modify and some of which are more difficult to change.

The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.

This is a strange conundrum that betrays our difficulties with classifying life, and our adherence to a system that was designed to show the perfection of divine creation, organisms static in time and set in stone as they stand before us. Darwin's great idea ruined that ideal, because he recognized that life passes through time, and changes continually. The only life forms that don't change are dead ones.

The mammals—hairy creatures that produce milk to nurture their young—are a small group of organisms on Earth, with only around 6,000 types known, one-fifth of which are different styles of bat.

I think it is the natural and innate function of certain organisms to secrete beauty in permanent forms we call artworks, to respond to beauty by answering its discovery with a new beauty.

The subject I was best at in school was biology.

I like biology a lot.

Giant group events are distorting organisms: You can like and hate them in rapid succession.

The third principle is loss aversion. When directly compared or weighted against each other, losses loom larger than gains. This asymmetry between the power of positive and negative expectations or experiences has an evolutionary history. Organisms that treat threats as more urgent than opportunities have a better chance to survive and reproduce.

All human beings are pain-pleasure organisms. Moral and political philosophy should therefore seek to increase pleasure and minimize pain. It should be democratic.

For life to truly thrive on this planet, there must be immense biodiversity. Only when billions of different individual organisms make the most of every resource and opportunity they encounter, and millions of species lead lives that interlock so that they sustain each other, can the planet run efficiently. The greater the biodiversity, the more secure will be all life on Earth, including ourselves. Yet the way we humans are now living on Earth is sending biodiversity into a decline.

it helpful to think that what evolves are the niches, and organisms negotiate for their occupancy.

Darwinists are right to say that selection favours the organisms that leave alive the most progeny, but vigorous growth takes place within a constrained space where feedback from the environment allows the emergence of natural self-regulation.

Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through "asexuality" ("without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs"). Each of them split in half: "Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).

Ironically, it was the completion of the Human Genome Project a decade ago that showed how little the genetic code told us about living organisms (and even less about complex ones such as us).

Just as a linguist penetrates the past to Proto-Indo-European, triangulating from modern languages and from already reconstructed dead languages, we can do the same with modern organisms, comparing either their external characteristics or their protein or DNA sequences.

Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.

The genetic code is universal. I regard this as near-conclusive proof that all organisms are descended from a single common ancestor.

Evolution is the external and visible manifestation of the differential survival of alternative replicators (Dawkins 1978a). Genes are replicators; organisms and groups of organisms are best not regarded as replicators; they are vehicles in which replicators travel about.

The point about recurrent reproduction life cycles, and hence, by implication, the point about organisms, is that they allow repeated returns to the drawing board during evolutionary time.